Small business owners often encounter difficulties when it comes to creating interactive ways to bring new customers to discover their websites. An often overlooked marketing channel that small business owners can take advantage of quickly and inexpensively is by creating a how-to video for their website.

Just think, how many times have you gone online for questions on how to create or repair something? Would you rather read instructions on how to solve your issue or WATCH a tutorial that had easy to follow steps?

Here are a few tips that will help you reach YouTube success!

#1 Optimize Your Channel

Before your business becomes a viral sensation, there are a few YouTube channel options you should check out:

Description Area – Make sure your description is clean, short and right to the point. Don’t forget to include all of your company’s social media sites, blog and website URLs. Keep in mind your channel description plays a big role in on how YouTube categorizes your channel and videos, so make sure to use keyword rich terms.

Channel Tags – YouTube is currently the second largest source of online traffic. Thus, it is vital that your channel and videos are properly tagged to ensure they show-up when potential customer are searching online.

Featured Video – Set-Up your channel to ensure featured video starts to auto-play as soon as a user lands on your channel. This can be achieved via the options available under the ‘Featured’ tab of your channel.

#2 Improve your VISIBILITY!

Latest statistics reveal that on average there are over 50,400 hours of content being uploaded on daily basis to YouTube. Thus you have to take extra steps to increase the likelihood your video stands out and comes up in searches.

Location Tagging — Don’t forget to tag your business location after uploading your video. This allows your video to be uploaded to Google Maps and Google Places, allowing it to be included in those search results.

Captions and Subtitles — Just like adding SEO rich keywords into the description of your channel, the title of your video and captions impact the search engine ranking of each video. Thus, choose your words wisely.

Thumbnail — Make sure the thumbnail you choose for your video is interesting and stands out, something that pulls a viewer in without being deceitful. Your thumbnail will be an excerpt from your video, so choose a thumbnail that shows action.

Video Reply — Try submitting your video as a “video reply” to industry related videos, this allows for your video to be posted on to the same page of the video you are replying to. Your video will be placed directly above the comment font box, so if you make a video reply to a high traffic video you are increasing your visibility.

Related Video — Another great way to gain visibility, is to be featured in the ‘related videos’ section when a user is viewing a relevant video. Related videos are chosen based on video categorizations. If you have a printing business, you do not want to be categorized as a restaurant, you want to come up as a ‘related video’ to videos dealing with printing or printing supplies. So make sure your Channel Tags, Video Tags and Video Titles are all relevant to each other, this gives you a better chance of being categorized correctly.

#3 Extend Your Network!

Once your video has been uploaded, don’t stop. Think of creative ways you can engage with your potential audience to drive community fellowship. Growing your follower list on YouTube will help you to gain social validation regarding the content value and gain potential new clients. Here are a few suggestions on how to grow your new YouTube network:

I understand the power of videos in ranking up higher on search engines. A website struggling to rank high on a particular keyword might succeed more through videos targeting the same keyword. The power of videos!